A study of the effects of transient fault injection into a 32-bit RISC with built-in watchdog

Author

Ohlsson, J. ; Rimen, M. ; Gunneflo, U.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Eng., Chalmers Univ. of Technol., Goteborg, Sweden

fYear

1992

fDate

8-10 July 1992

Firstpage

316

Lastpage

325

Abstract

An error-detecting 32-b reduced instruction set computer (RISC) designed in a 1.2- mu m CMOS technology with an on-chip watchdog using embedded signature monitoring is presented. It was evaluated through simulation-based fault injection, using a register level model written in VHDL (very high-speed IC (VHSIC) description language). A chip area increase of 4.7% was caused by the watchdog. Two application programs were executed to study workload dependencies. The insertion of watchdog instructions resulted in a memory overhead of between 13% and 25% as well as a performance overhead of between 9% and 19%. A total of 2779 faults were injected into the processor during execution of the application programs. Only 23% of these resulted in effective errors. A minimum detection coverage of 95% was reached for effective errors classified as control flow errors with a median latency of one clock cycle. Few effective data errors, between 22% and 50%, were detected.<>

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; fault location; fault tolerant computing; reduced instruction set computing; specification languages; 1.2 micron; 32 bit; 32-bit RISC; CMOS technology; VHDL; application programs; built-in watchdog; embedded signature monitoring; median latency; memory overhead; minimum detection coverage; performance overhead; register level model; transient fault injection; very high-speed IC; CMOS technology; Computational modeling; Computer aided instruction; Computer errors; Computerized monitoring; Embedded computing; Error correction; Integrated circuit modeling; Reduced instruction set computing; Registers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Fault-Tolerant Computing, 1992. FTCS-22. Digest of Papers., Twenty-Second International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Boston, MA, USA

Print_ISBN

0-8186-2875-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/FTCS.1992.243569

Filename

243569